Leadership Strategies For Facing Distraction, Disruption And Destruction
Leaders best able to face the chaos of this time have access to centeredness, truth, agility and wholeness of heart. Credit: Pavel Danilyuk, PEXELS
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on February 1st, 2025.
Only two times in its history has Scientific American waded into the waters of endorsing a presidential candidate: Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024. Both times, it was for the same reason, that their opponent—now President Trump—was deeply unscientific. Shortly into his second term, we see evidence of that as he shut off public health communication from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) while an active health threat to Americans, the bird flu virus, is underway. He also shut down activity at the National Institutes of Health, which determines funding to academic institutions. As for priorities in the Department of Health and Human Services, his direction was to root out any Diversity, Equity or Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and report colleagues who might be “disguising” such activities.
As of this writing, we’re still in the shock and awe stage of the second Trump presidency. Some of his directives will turn out to be distractions, some will be disruptive, many will be destructive. Regardless which side of the political aisle one favors, it’s hard to miss the irony—or dangers—of a deeply unscientific President supported by a billionaire class whose wealth was made possible by science, leading a country who advances have been made possible by science. We seem to be regressing as a country to a pre-rational stage while flouting the power that comes only with being a rational, scientific society. Leaders, meaning anyone committed to making a positive difference, are in for a wild year. All the more reason to have some trustworthy strategies for facing its distraction, disruption and destruction. Here are four.
Be Centered
The ability to face unsettling conditions on the outside starts with stability on the inside, that is, a quality of centeredness. Our language and experience tell us that the countervailing force to being spun up, upset or wound up is to slow down, settle down and calm down. So, the centeredness that will best support us is grounded down, through our feet into the earth, and centered in the lower abdomen, the region called hara.
Hara centeredness is central in Japanese martial arts, as well as in Zen Leadership and my line of Zen training as it supports deep, slow breathing, generates vital energy and coordinates the most effective use of the body. Techniques for hara breathing have been written about and shown elsewhere. In meditation, hara breathing cuts through discursive thinking and cultivates the kind of mind that is not easily distracted. In martial arts and leadership, it supports clarity and coherence in action, even under tense conditions.
As an example of this training at work, tense conditions are exactly what Zen colleagues, David and Sarah, face in their home city of Chicago, which has been targeted by the Trump administration for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, against which due process resistance has organized including the Mayor’s and Governor’s offices and the Chicago police. According to David, the ICE activity seems to be aimed at “instilling fear and making people feel targeted from multiple sides, literally scared into submission. And we tell everyone what we do to not default into fear: Zen, walking, connecting with people, puzzling, reading, napping, anything that brings joy and centers us.”
The more centered we are, the more we can help others find similar stability in themselves. The more stable we are collectively, the less unhinged we will become in this time, including being unhinged from the truth.
Be True
It’s worth remembering in an era of Truth Social that truth is not clicks; it’s not up for grabs to the highest bidder or most outrageous tweeter. There is a Way to life, a way to know when to seed and when to harvest, or how to use the laws of physics to launch a rocket into space. For millennia, from Indigenous wisdom traditions to Taoism to science, humans have tried to understand that way, indeed, participate in and harness that way to flourish. None of that changes because of who’s president; truth is truth, and being a human part of it means we have a compass for it.
Bill George calls this the “True North” that guides leaders through a successful life. It shows up in staying true to our values, true our mission and reminding people why we do what we do. For example the day after the CDC gag order came out, Katelyn Jatelina, writing as Your Local Epidemiologist, reminded people to see past distraction to what is true:
This is a moment of uncertainty, but public health has always been about more than federal leadership. It’s about the local communities, the health workers, and the scientists who step forward when systems falter. There are a lot of unknowns, but what we do know is that public health is needed today, tomorrow, and every day after that. Stay steady, stay engaged, and keep your eye on the ball. The health of 330 million Americans depends on it.
Of course, not everyone has the same values or sees the same truth. Each person reads their compass from their own perspective. Part of being committed to truth is recognizing that no single perspective can see the whole picture, so we willingly seek multiple sources and listen to one another. This is exactly how science accumulates collective knowledge, where each person declares their truth and how they came to it, so others can replicate it, improve on it, perhaps disprove it, but collectively we keep unveiling more of the cosmos.
Part of being true is being willing to drop our opinions in favor of getting to a common foundation in empirical facts.
Be Agile
Being centered and true helps us lead with clear intention, but in times of wild uncertainty, we also need to be agile and not attached to outcomes. Aiming for an outcome is part of clear intention, but getting stuck there when the landscape has radically changed is pointless and exhausting. At times, when major social, political or climatic forces are raining down on us, the best we can do is simply take care of people. Advance the mission another day.
An ever-present way to access this agility is through the four energy patterns of our nervous system. By skillfully moving between them, we cover the bases of leadership from sensing a future ready to happen to giving that vision some form and process, to engaging others in collaboration, to making a determined push to bring that future into the present. These four patterns—Visionary, Organizer, Collaborator and Driver—also respond differently to change. The Driver in us wants to fight, especially if the change is unwanted and unsupportive of our goals. The Collaborator in us can more readily roll with the punches, connect with others and find its way around obstacles. Our inner Organizer might feel anxious and struggle to adapt to the new rules of the game, while our Visionary pattern can connect to the big picture, let go and expand into new possibilities.
What we know from our research into FEBI, the personality assessment that measures these mind-body patterns, is that most of us have a couple of preferred patterns that we use regularly. But it’s also true that we have all four and can physically access weaker patterns as we need them, making them easier to access with practice. If you were a leader in a government agency that was suddenly shut down or silenced, which patterns would most help you most now? They may not be the patterns that got you the job.
Hara centeredness, a commitment to and connection with what’s true, and agility of means without attachment to ends can help meet the chaos of this time with the best that can come through us.
Be Heartened
Zooming in on the chaos campaign of these early days of the second Trump administration might be entertaining to some but is also a source of outrage and despair to many—certainly to all those who have dedicated their careers to scientific and democratic values. Zooming out on this pre-rational regression that has taken hold in our culture, one can see it fitting a larger picture of autocracies on the rise in a “might makes right” world, where the wealthy are determined to be the prevailing class. Zooming out further, one can see how this even pattern is fueled by the existential fear that the overburdened ecology of our planet cannot sustainably support modern human life as we’ve construed it. Zooming out further still to take in the long arc of evolution and human development, one can see how it always moves in fits and starts—not a straight line—but the direction is clear: we grow up toward greater complexity, consciousness and connection. And finally, zooming out to the level of the great cosmic dance of Big Bangs and creation and destruction and ever-churning change, one can see how, yes, even the creative destruction of our current time is not out of place.
Whether as an act of imagination or the Zen Leadership experience of ourselves as this whole, churning picture, we can take heart in recognizing that we are both part and whole: both a local self-in-a-skin and an unborn and undying whole Self through which this phenomenal universe resonates. We can take heart in the possibility that we chose this time to be local, to take our place as a leader, so that some truth could come through us—what we might call our purpose, our True North—that adds value for others. From a place of wholeness, we can face distraction, disruption and destruction centered in our truth, agile in our means and with boundless resilience and resourcefulness. Let’s do this.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.
